Heritable one-hit events defining cancer prevention?

Over 100 y ago (1902–1914) Theodor Boveri suggested a role for mutations in cancer.1,2 Boveri’s ideas were derived from the then “just-emerging” chromosome theory of inheritance. While demonstrating chromosomal aberrations as a cause of genetic imbalance, Boveri suggested that possible causes of malignancy may include events such as aneuploidy that are now defined as gene mutations, asserting all the while that malignancy occurs at the cellular level. Indeed, studies to date essentially uniformly show that cancer is a genetic disease.3,4